Epicenter

From the looks of it I’d say the creator of epicenter either didn’t knew about some powerjumps or he deliberately didn’t take them into account.

There are primarily 2 spots on each side of the map which makes me think so: One is the roof of the building in which the teams respawn in, the other one is the fence near the APC.The first one is actually quite easy. The roof is not finished. There is only a section creating some kind of ledge which can be reached by most power jumps (even with a simple RJ). But the rest of the roof is not visible. You will just see the skybox and you can’t move over the rest of that roof (but sadly enough you can throw grenadews from the roof into the respawn). If we assume the mapmaker wasn’t a complete newbie I’m sure he would have created that roof section properly if he had expected players to reach it. Additionally I think if this part of the map should have been able to be used strategically the mapmaker would have added another means of access (e.g. a ladder). However, I was told that Valve was aware that this section was accessible by powerjumps during the betatests for the TF 1.5 patch which shipped this map, so the question is why this was never addressed (heck, if they want the roof to stay accessible just put a damn wall to separate the ledge from the rest of the roof).

The fence on the other hand is more complicated. IMO it was never intended that a cjumper could make a jump over the fence right to the APC. The fence itself is a misconstruction in the context of the APC-area. I think the mapmaker wanted the APC to be defendable, but OTOH make this area accessible enough to give the offense a chance to break down D and to cap. The fence IMO should give the offense the chance to take out sentries and defenders with nailguns, rockets or grenades. Maybe - but just maybe - the mapmaker wanted to create an additional attackroute for RJumping soldiers to clear enemy D. But I’m pretty sure it was never intended that a cjumper could jump from the ledge on the ruins or the area in front of the fence to the APC. When done correctly the cjumper will be able to bypass any number of sentries and land directly on the cappoint.

But maybe there is a reason for that flaw.

During the betatests for TF 1.5 Valve removed cjumping completely. When the new maps (epicenter, warpath and dustbowl) were playtested there was no cjumping. Looking at those maps I’d like to assume the maps were created with that decision in mind. As an example: I’m sure it is by design that on warpath you can’t reach the final CP by running without the prior CP being open again. IMO that was intended to be a safeguard so a single scout cannot make it through all points in a single run without the enemy team to be able to counter. Dustbowl would also have some problems with cjumping if the sky wasn’t so low.It was much later, almost near the end of the betatests, that Valve decided to reintegrate cjumping as drop-and-jump-variant (I don’t think they realized at that time that handheld jumps still work). I can’t help but thinking that they failed to realize the consequences of the reintroduction of cjumping to those maps, especially to epicenter.

Personally I would like to see a revision of epicenter which would make the roof part inaccessible at all and somehow altered the fence so you could still shoot or lob grenades over it, but you would not be able to jump over the fence. Sure, this would make offense a lot more difficult, but I’d rather see offense requiring teamwork to succeed than a scout or medic breaking through heavy D without any trouble (and I have seen a number of people doing exactly that).

Ack, now where did Tot put all the asbestos suits? He can’t have used them up all ...